Product Carbon Footprint and Life Cycle Assessment of ICT -- Literature Review and State of the Art

The concepts of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Carbon Footprint (CF) represent powerful tools in aiding towards the reduction of an organization´s environmental impacts. Because of the influence of information and communication technology (ICT) on worldwide environmental impacts, these concepts are particularly significant in this field and receive growing interest. Surprisingly, literature constitutes ICT-related LCAs to be strongly affected by uncertainty as well as comparability and validity issues. This contribution aims at clarifying the status quo of ICT-related LCAs by providing a literature review of existing studies. The review reveals and discusses the current situation, displays evidently accepted standards and methodologies as well as similarities within the studies and finally points out research gaps.